New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Mayor under fire after city is left without a finance director at start of budget season
WEST HAVEN — When the city made the unexpected announcement Friday that Finance Director Scott Jackson would “move forward in his public service career,” effective immediately, it came with an assurance from Mayor Nancy Rossi.
“Scott will continue to assist and support the city on bonding and budgetary matters in the coming weeks during his career transition,” Rossi said in a statement announcing Jackson’s departure.
But at a City Council meeting the following Monday, council members were asked to consider appropriating $13.9 million in bonding with no one from the Finance Department available to answer their questions.
“It wasn’t that long ago we would have the finance director, the bond council and all sorts of individuals to guide us through going to market,” said Councilman Ron Quagliani, D-At Large.
Quagliani, who is on the council’s finance committee, said the list of projects presented to the council appeared to be inaccurate, as there were projects listed that council members already had agreed to fund with federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.
When Corporation Counsel Lee Tiernan, the only city employee present at the meeting, advised that delaying a vote could harm the city’s timing on some bonding projects, finance committee Chairwoman Bridgette Hoskie, D-1, said she would “refuse to take blame” for consequences that arise from the council being presented with significant information absent any context or clarification.
“We can’t do our job without a full accounting of what is going on in the city,” she said. “If the finance director couldn’t be here, then his boss should’ve been.”
Rossi has been absent from City Council meetings for months, and has had inconsistent attendance with the Municipal Accountability Review Board — a state financial oversight board whose members repeatedly have raised concerns about Rossi’s willingness to collaborate with their directives. Some members have expressed a willingness to initiate a legislative process to authorize a state takeover of the city, although Office of Policy and Management Secretary Jeffrey Beckham said he believed such a plan is premature as accountants currently are conducting an analysis of the city’s finances and its procedures.
An OPM spokesman declined to comment Tuesday.
At a town hall-style meeting last week, Rossi said her absences from public meetings over the last year largely were due to her being a caretaker for her ailing husband. She said she has Jackson attend meetings as a designee; within days, she released the joint statement with Jackson announcing his departure from the position.
Rossi did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the city’s plans to prepare a budget for the 2024 fiscal year or to see through the completion of the late 2022 fiscal year audit. She did not comment on who in the city administration is collaborating with the MARB or with Whittlesey, the accounting firm conducting the financial analysis.
Jackson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday about the assistance or support that Rossi said he would provide to the city in the Friday statement.
Hoskie said it was her understanding that David Taylor, the city’s assistant finance director, had been given Jackson’s duties in the interim, but nothing has been communicated to her clearly.
“I truly don’t know,” she said. “I hope there’s a plan for the budget, because this is the situation we were in last year.”
Taylor did not respond to a request for comment about whether his duties have changed.
Jackson’s final day with West Haven was Feb. 24, exactly one year after his predecessor, Frank Cieplinski, was fired. Jackson told the Register at the time of his hire that he had communicated with Rossi about the job prior to Cieplinski’s departure. The timing of his hiring meant he had little time to familiarize himself with the city’s finances before releasing a budget to the City Council.
Although Rossi has not made an announcement as to whether she will seek a fourth term as mayor, several candidates who have filed their candidacy or formed an exploratory committee expressed concerns about Jackson’s departure.
“This is not the time to be without a finance director,” said Steven R. Mullins, a Republican mayoral candidate and former longtime planning and zoning commissioner. Mullins said Jackson, a former mayor of Hamden, came to the city “with a wealth of knowledge and expertise” but has now departed. He called for Rossi to resign immediately at Monday’s council meeting.
Paige Weinstein, a Republican mayoral candidate, said the city has “no idea what the bottom is here.”
“It’s like we’re treading water and we just can’t find the bottom of the water. It is absolutely horrible,” she said. “This position has to be filled immediately.”
She concurred with comments state Rep. Dorinda Borer, D-West Haven, made to the Register Friday that the timing was extremely poor and that the MARB should send in an expert to help the city on the ground immediately.
“Whittlesey has put in so many hours and, I would hope, is almost at the end of their process or investigation so that they’d be able to address the finance department immediately and put someone in there knowing what they already know,” Weinstein said.
Like Mullins, Weinstein said she believes Rossi should resign.
“She made a comment that it’s a 24/7 job, and I agree with her that family comes first. That being said, if she’s incapable of doing the job she needs to step aside and let somebody else do it,” she said. “It is so totally unfair to the council members that they’re there trying to do their job and they have no cooperation from the city so that they can do the best job that they can do.”
Former Mayor Ed O’Brien, a Democrat who was defeated by Rossi in 2017 and has filed an exploratory committee for a 2023 mayoral run, said the finance department vacancy is a “worst-case scenario.”
“Nobody steering the city’s financial ship while we are smack in the middle of next year’s budget process,” he said in an email. “We have uncompleted audits and now nobody to work with MARB to get out of the mess this group has thrust upon us.”